


Going Stag

by Prosodi



Category: Half Moon Investigations
Genre: Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-09
Updated: 2012-02-09
Packaged: 2017-10-30 20:57:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/335982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prosodi/pseuds/Prosodi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fletcher gets asked to the school dance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Going Stag

'Incoming, ten o'clock,' Red said.

Fletcher had just enough time to sit up and put his half-eaten ham sandwich away before the girl in the yellow jumper zeroed in on them. She stopped, flat footed, in front of the bench he and Red had been having lunch on and swayed for a moment looking clammy and anxious. Something serious, Fletcher thought. A prickle of excitement ran it's cool fingers down his neck.

She couldn't quite meet his eye and instead stared at the edge of the bench. 'Can I help you?' Fletcher prompted gently, trying to suppress his own anticipation. Something big - a bike thieving ring, an extortion racket running the length and breath of secondary school. He was fifteen and in a strange inbetween place where 'The Case of the Missing Lunchbox' or 'Fletcher, I Think That Kid Stole My Pencil Case' were getting few and far between (and stagnant besides), but nothing from the top was coming in to replace them. Not just yet.

It had been a slow year.

The girl, who was probably a year below him and had hair the color of wheat, looked at him straight on then. It seemed like she might cry. Fletcher leaned forward by a degree. She then asked very seriously, 'Will you go to the dance with me?'

Red burst into laughter beside him. The girl started like a bird, swinging away like she might run off before she fully realized that it was Red laughing and not Fletcher. She jerked back around, bright red in the face. As a coverup, she got demanding: 'Well? Yes or no, Moon? I can't stand about all day.' 

Running your mouth of was fundamentally against every rule in Bernstein's handbook, but after three months of slow cases he was getting rusty. Fletcher, who had gone stag to school dances before but had largely forgotten they'd existed by the time it became a thing for actual couples and actual dancing that didn't involve the Primary Three Step any longer (arms flailing, knees bending, always performed in a circle), found himself answering without thinking out of panic.

He said, 'Okay?' like it was a question.

The girl turned an even brighter shade of red. She grasped wildly at the strap of her knapsack, said 'Oh. Alright. Good. Excellent,' and then ran away. Fletcher felt the silence that followed was somehow significant - that maybe it marked the transition from boyhood to adulthood, or that this was the long profane silence before spontaneous human combustion cued off.

'Do you even know how to dance?' Red asked him a little aggressively, wiping his crisp-greasy fingers on the knee of his jeans.

Ah, there it was - the other shoe dropping. If there was any color left in Fletcher's face at all, it drained away rapidly.

But private investigation was at least five parts problem solving, so Fletcher did the only thing any self respecting student of deduction would do: research. The school library was unsurprisingly useless, but some focused google searches online that night at least brought up a few relevant youtube videos, some passable how-tos - though he couldn't summon the courage to actually put any of the theory into practice even behind the closed door of his bedroom. His parents were out there. Hazel was out there. If he went tromping about his bedroom attempting to teach himself how to slow dance with his pillow clutched against him, someone was going to find out. So instead Fletcher sat stooped over his laptop clutching his chin in a cold sweat, a buzzing hum of anxiety creeping under his skin.

'Is there something the matter?' his mother asked the next morning. 

Fletcher choked down his breakfast. It was wrong to agree to something and then backpedal wildly away from it, but in this case he was seriously considering it. It would be better this way - Lydia Fisher (which was the name of the wheat haired girl; he'd spent some time trawling this last year's school photo book until he'd found her) probably wanted someone she could talk to and dance with, and at this rate he'd be good for neither.

'Nothing,' he told his mother because the alternatives were too terrible to imagine and he wasn't about to bring her in to this sort of thing. If he told her he was going to a dance - that he'd been asked by a girl to the dance - she would probably write the newspaper. At the very least, he'd not only be forced to go but would have to wear dress shoes.

By the time he met Red on the road on the way to school, he was utterly despondent and trying his best to hide it. The sound of the mountain bike's tires hummed up the pavement behind him and Fletcher schooled his expression, willed himself to be light hearted and kept pedaling his own bike as Red fell in beside him. He was wearing a dark leather bomber jacket over his barely-regulation school uniform, tie flapping in the wind over his shoulder.

'You look miserable,' he said, matter of fact.

Fletcher stared at him, mouth flattened into a line. He gripped the handles of his bike, determined. He was not miserable. He was perfectly fine. He-- 'I don't know how to dance,' Fletcher all but vomited.

Their bicycle tires whirred as they bowed around the corner. Red stood on his pedals, shoulders curved forward over the handlebars. 'Hazel could teach you.'

The thought was mortifying. 'She's busy with work,' Fletcher said quickly, which was partly true but mostly an excuse to never tell his sister anything about his dancing abilities, school related or otherwise.

'Then ditch the girl.'

'I can't just tell her no after I've already agreed!'

Red frowned, putting his weight into his pedaling. 'Sounds like you're in a tight spot then, Moon,' he barked and leaned forward, pedaling wildly and streaking ahead uphill.

Fletcher tried to bike faster to catch up to him, but his strengths lay in entirely different fields and gaining momentum uphill was not one of them. By the time he'd reached the crest, Red had already leapt off his bike and thrown it into the lockup at the school gate. Panting and red in the face, Fletcher limped toward the school a very distant second.

Red seemed to have forgiven him his complete ignorance of all things girl-related enough to sit with him during lunch period which they spent on the fringe of the basketball courts, although by that time the realization that even his partner couldn't understand his complete incapability of handling a little boy-girl interaction was weighing pretty heavily on Fletcher. They ate in relative silence - with no active cases, Fletcher couldn't even proverbially spread out evidence on the table between them and turn the topic of conversation in that direction. He felt completely incapable and completely isolated despite Red being there right next to him, downing pop and vending machine pretzels.

Toward the end of the period, Lydia Fisher appeared like a dreadful apparition. Her low heels clacked loudly on the asphalt, the green ribbon in her plaited hair limp in the soggy autumn air. She greeted them and smiled shyly. 'What do you want?' Red demanded.

Lydia balked. She brandished her mobile like a weapon and looked to Fletcher, eyes flashing and face going red over being called out. 'I thought I'd give you my number so you can arrange the details.'

'Details?' Fletcher heard himself ask. What kind of details could there possibly be? Show up, dance some, go home. It seemed fairly straightforward.

'You know - what I'm wearing, so what you need to wear to coordinate. Who's driving and that sort of thing.'

'He doesn't have a license,' Red said.

'Can't we meet here?' Fletcher asked, throwing himself on the proverbial fire sparking between the two of them in a desperate attempt to keep anything from exploding.

Lydia seemed momentarily horrified. She shook her head, saying 'Just give me your number and we'll talk about it later when--' Fletcher wasn't rusty enough to miss the way her gaze cut sharply over to Red. Before he know it, he'd given her his number and had managed to get himself hip deep in trouble whereas that morning it had really just been around his knees, his ankles even.

Fletcher watched her go, feeling miserable and cornered. When he glanced over, he found Red crushing his can on the table top. 'Did the can do something to you?' he asked, laughing anxiously.

Without warning Red rounded on him. 'You don't seriously fancy her, do you? You don't even know who that girl is and now you've given her your number.'

Red had been as legit as they come for a long time, but for a moment he looked all sharp and angular with his ears tipped an angry red. Fletcher used his ham sandwich as a shield - which all in all would have been a massive, somewhat mayonaise-y failure if Red had actually done anything beyond looking blustery.

'Her? No, but that's not--'

'You shouldn't lead her along like that, Moon. It's cruel.'

And there he went, shoving off again and streaking across the basketball courts with his hands in the pockets of his non-regulation leather jacket.

Fletcher stared at his back for a long time and then looked down at the sandwich unfolding in his hand. He took a bite, chewed slowly and felt incalculably wretched. "Oh," he mumbled.

That evening he knocked on Hazel's door. There was the muffled howl of acknowledgment and when he opened the door he found his sister face down and diagonal across her bed with her work uniform still on. He had the distinct impression she'd been screaming angrily into her pillow. Hazel had just turned twenty and was working at the grocer so she could save money and move anywhere other than Lock. She frequently said that the atmosphere of the green grocer was killing her creative genius, that she was being crushed under the demands of menial labor. Apparently that afternoon had been a particularly pressing one.

'Baby vomit,' she declared, rolling over and kicking off one of her shoes. It went sailing into the far wall. 'I never want to see another baby again! I am never having children!'

Fletcher carefully sat on the trunk at the end of the bed. He pulled his legs up, settled his knees under his chin and waited until she was nearly done (as Hazel would never be _truly_ done, 'nearly' was likely the most he was going to get). She eventually toed off her second shoe with significantly less violence and sighed. He took that as some kind of sign.

'I need your professional opinion.'

Hazel tipped her face to take account of him. Her eyes were narrowed, understandably suspicious. 'Really?'

'You know a lot about, you know, girls.'

'Which are not actually a different species, but go on.'

'And about, say, dancing.'

That got her attention. Hazel rose slowly from the mattress, her back straight like a vampire rising from its coffin. She craned her head around and fixed him with a long, unwavering look. 'Dancing,' she repeated breathlessly. 'Dancing with girls.'

Fletcher, enured to his sister's behavior but no less embarrassed simply said, 'Yes.'

'Who is she? Does mom know? Does dad know? What dance?'

'A girl. Please no and no. And I don't know, it's just a dance. Look - I just. It's not even like that. It's actually about Red.'

'Oh. Are you asking me about this because I'm in theater?'

'Well not specifically, but maybe that helps. You're just more experienced with this kind of thing.'

She started to untie her green apron, balled it up and tossed it across her dresser. 'In dancing with boys? Sure.'

Fletcher tipped his head, but didn't let the tertiary remark sidetrack him for too long. If it was important, he'd remember it when he needed to. 'Ever since I agreed to go, he's been angry. I think he might like the girl.'

Hazel rolled to her feet and went to the mirror on her closet door so she could make some attempt at straightening her hair. 'So he's jealous.'

As far as he could tell, yes - but Fletcher only had a hunch to go on. No evidence, no unbiased vantage from where he could get a clear picture of things. It was the number one rule: don't become a piece in the puzzle, so it was no surprise he couldn't make it out. He was too close to it. 'I had to give her my phone number and he didn't talk to me afterward.'

Hazel combed her fingers through her blonde hair, shook it back and adjusted her headband. 'Well is it something you should have known? I mean, did he tell you that he liked this girl?'

'No.'

'Then it's not really your fault.' She looked at him in the mirror and quirked her eyebrows. 'Anyway it's just a dance, it's not like you're marrying her.'

'But he's my partner. If a case comes through and he's still angry at me--' 

Hazel turned to face him with her hands on her hips. 'Look Fletcher, it's not your job to babysit your friend's feelings. If you want to ask him what his deal is then do it, but don't apologize or I'll punch you myself. Also I'll tell mom you're going to a dance with a girl.'

Fletcher threw up his hands, recoiling from the weight of the threat. 'Alright! No apologies! Just don't tell anyone.'

'Good.' Hazel nodded sharply and sniffed. 'Now get out of my room - I can feel pages coming on.' 

Fletcher didn't talk to Red about the dance or about Lydia Fisher at all that Friday. In fact, they didn't speak about much of anything at all. It wasn't the same as avoidance, as Red simply not wishing to speak to him at all. That, Fletcher thought, might have almost been better. At least then he would have known where he stood. Instead they went to their respective classes and sat together at lunch and didn't exchange more than a handful of sentences for the entire free period. It was awful. Over the years, Fletcher had learned to accept the fact that he was strange, but had become equally used to the fact that he at least had a partner to work with. But that work was thinning out (fifteen was a rough age for a boy detective) and now this. He was officially stuck between a rock and a hard place, neither of which he could identify in a lineup much less in the overcast school yard.

Mercifully, he saw neither hide or hair of Lydia Fisher and at the end of the day as he unlocked his bike from the rack he managed to steel himself to ask a question - to ask The Question. While looping his bike lock around his wrist, he asked Red 'Are you angry at me for Lydia Fisher?' 

Red stopped wrestling his mountain bike from the rack. He stared at him, apparently surprised after the day's lull. After the initial shock wore off his jaw set stubbornly and he tore the bike from the stand. 'Come over tomorrow. Early.' he said, mounting the bike with one fluid motion and then shoving off down the hill. In moments he was gone.

Fletcher swore at himself repeatedly for saying anything at all. He swore again when his bike picked up a nail three blocks from home and he kept swearing under his breath as he walked it along, waiting for even more bad luck to worm out of the wood work. He did not, however, swear even once while walking over to Chez Sharkey the next morning. On the contrary, while Fletcher had gone to sleep angry he had woken with a deep gnawing sense of dread uncertain about the Red Sharkey definition of 'early.' He was sure it wasn't the same thing as eight in the morning however though, so he managed to loiter about the house for a whole hour before he shrugged into his coat, stuffed his feet in his shoes and made his way on foot to Chez Sharkey with a distinct sense of foreboding.

When he arrived, he knew immediately why Red had told him to come early. His father's sleek expensive car wasn't in the driveway and from the overall sense of serenity, he thought the rest of the household might still be asleep - no self respecting Sharkey woke up before one in the afternoon on a Saturday unless there was work to be done. Fletcher tried not to think about what kind of work and instead knocked on the door very softly (though a hurricane could blow through Luck without waking Genie or Roddy).

Red jerked it open. He gave Fletcher a quick once over and said, 'You're later than I thought you'd be.' :Fletcher apologized and hoped Hazel never found out about it. Red pulled him in, shot a surreptitious look toward the stairs and then hustled Fletcher into one of the drawing rooms that was usually shut up after summer.

It wasn't like when they went to his Gran's summer home after she'd died and had to pull off dust covers and crack all the widows and get rid of the must smell. Namely, there were no dust covers. But secondly Fletcher was sure no amount of fresh air would ever get the musty tang out of the furniture or the floors. It was the perfect sort of room for receiving bad news and Fletcher braced himself for it. This was it, he told himself. It was what he'd been steeling himself for all morning. Red Sharkey didn't want to be his partner anymore.

And who would blame him? No cases more exciting than tracking the source of secret admirer notes left in lockers and now he was going to the school dance with Lydia Fisher who Red apparently fancied quite a lot, which was completely idiot. Fletcher felt a flush of real anger building and he didn't know why, except that it wasn't his fault - he hadn't known Red liked some straw haired girl two years younger than him. Music blared from the CD player. Red swore and quickly cranked the volume down to a manageable level less likely to wake up half the continent. Standing up, he brushed his hands on his knees and cleared his throat, itched his nose. 'Alright Moon, show me what you've got.'

It took a moment from Fletcher's mind to shift gears. 'What?'

'Your moves. Your dancing.'

'My--' Oh. Oh.

'I have to know what I'm working with,' Red said while he rolled up his sleeves.

His feet failed him. If Fletcher ever had any moves to speak of, they were no longer with him. He looked down at his feet. He looked at Red, who looked a combination of sick and expectant. Fletcher shuffled back and forth on the ball of his feet and tried to sort out where his arms were against his sides. The music, which was some bit of pop music likely pirated off the Sharkey's piggy backed broadband, seemed completely indistinguishable. Looking back up, Fletcher found Red's mouth had tightened into a thin narrow line. He couldn't tell if he was trying not to laugh or trying not to cry. Considering how often Red Sharkey cried, the fact that he couldn't really determine which made Fletcher feel even worse.

'I should just tell her I'm sick,' he said quickly, grasping at the only avenue left to him. 'If I have stomach flu or pneumonia then she won't know and I won't have to learn and you won't have to be angry anymore. You - you can go to the dance with her instead. You can be my second.' Like in dueling.

Red grimaced at him. 'I don't want to go dancing.'

'Then why are you angry at me?' Fletcher shouted. It was louder than he'd meant to be and after the ring of his voice died the room seemed very quiet. They both strained their ears for the sound of anyone moving around upstairs. The music hummed softly, white noise in the background as the track skipped from the top pops to some slow sultry ballad. Fletcher looked at Red, found his face was pale and his shoulders were up around his ears like he was trying to avoid something.

'If you wanted to date Lydia Fisher you could just tell me,' Fletcher said, albeit significantly more softly to keep from waking either Genie or Roddy. He didn't know what else to do and so, like a dog, latched on to what he knew: pursuing a lead, pressing until he got the information he needed or wanted.

Red's mouth worked. He frowned. A flush had started to crawl up the back of his freckled neck and creep into his hairline. 'I'm not jealous of you going to a dance with Lydia Fisher,' he said defensively.

'I'm missing something then.' He must be. There was something he'd overlooked, some important factor he'd just missed entirely. Fletcher struggled to click the pieces into place. Nothing seemed to fit together right. He'd agreed to go to the dance, Red had gotten angry. He didn't care about Lydia Fisher - or at least not going to the dance with her -, and Red himself had said he didn't want to go dancing so it wasn't as if it was simply that Fletcher had been invited and Red had no one to go with (besides, he knew Red not having available girls was about as likely as Fletcher learning to fly). 

Fletcher caught his eye. Red went redder. Fletcher had the time to think _Oh_ (and to experience a slight thrill of satisfaction and pleasure from solving the puzzle) before Red took a step forward and caught his hand. 'She's taller than you, right Half Moon?' he asked, guiding Fletcher's hands to his waist.

'I. Uh. Think so,' Fletcher stammered. The music was very slow.

'I'm not jealous of her,' Red said. He put his hands on Fletcher's shoulders. His hands were very warm.

For a moment they swayed awkwardly back and forth, the angle of Red's hips under his hands dictating the stiff angle of Fletcher's shoulders. Then the song ended and some pop music clicked back over (it was a pretty thoughtless mix). Red didn't take his hands off Fletcher's shoulders and Fletcher found himself fumbling a little awkwardly at Red's waist but not really wanting to do anything otherwise. He realized he was touching Red's belt and his hands promptly shot up an inch and a half.

'Don't step on my feet,' said Red, fingers knitting lazily behind Fletcher's neck.

'Sorry.' There he went, apologizing again.

'Just don't let it happen again.'


End file.
